---
node: founding_of_rome
type: event
slug: founding_of_rome
title: "Founding of Rome"
lead: "By Roman tradition Rome was founded in 753 BC, the legend crediting Romulus, who with his twin Remus was suckled by a she-wolf, killed Remus, and became first king. These are legends preserved in much later sources, not documented history."
published: 2026-07-11
updated: 2026-08-27
change: "Rewrote the opening body section so that it no longer restates the page's own lead."
previous_hash: "68a78ae1ee965f4cff8478f2fb6f2e4320eda9fbb3dc1ff9ab0b156d18653761"
requester: internal
reason: "The section repeated the lead, so the first thing under the first heading was text the reader had already read in the search result."
image_file: founding_of_rome.jpg
image_source: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lupa_Capitolina,_Rome.jpg"
image_author: "Unknown"
image_license: "CC0"
---

## What happened

The date the Romans settled on was not just a year but a day: 21 April, the Parilia, an old shepherds' festival of purification for the flocks, which the city then kept as its own birthday and still does. The legend they attached to it is a violent one, and they knew it — a fratricide at the moment of foundation, and a wolf who suckled the twins whose Latin name, lupa, was also the ordinary word for a prostitute, a reading some Roman writers preferred. Rome's calendar counted from the date afterwards: ab urbe condita, from the founding of the city.

## Background

Archaeology shows Iron Age villages on Rome's hills, notably the Palatine, coalescing into a city from about the 8th century BC, at the crossroads of the Latin, Sabine, and Etruscan worlds. The traditional date and story were systematized by later Roman writers such as Varro and Livy.

## Consequences

The legend gave Rome a foundational identity, and 753 BC became the epoch of the Roman calendar (ab urbe condita). The monarchy it began was, by tradition, overthrown in 509 BC to found the Republic.